I am moving. My house is decorated with boxes splashed with fat sharpie letters, some blue, some red. Some boxes are taped closed, and some are still open with mouths waiting for more to eat. And I have been walking the fine line of packing enough to make progress while leaving enough for it to still feel like home.

Until today.

And today I gave my landlord 30-days notice.

He is coming in 4 days with the realtor to go through the house and determine “major repairs”, so the house and be readied to show as quickly as possible.

And now suddenly it feels familiar, but no longer like home.

People keep asking me where I am moving, and I shrug. I don’t know. I only know I am not staying, and I keep thinking of the scene from “Eat, Pray, Love” where the lovely Julia Roberts is standing outside the rental unit and says her whole life fits into a 12×12 square, and the man says she wouldn’t believe how many times he hears that in a day or how many people never come back to get their 12×12 life.

I wonder if my life fits in a 12×12 square.

One of the perks of having no clear place to move, knowing much of my things will need to be stored is the freedom to purge things, even large things like furniture, that was exactly what I or my kids needed at one point but really serve no purpose now other than they are here and it seems irresponsible to simply get rid of them.

Sometimes moving with no clear forward is freedom to unearth yourself.

I am not going to lie. This process has stretched me and forced me to dig deep into my faith and trust God for a miracle or simply lie in bed numb from all the decisions that need to be made with no information on which to base them.

I won’t even tell you “But I have peace!” because for much of this, I have not had peace. It has been excruciating. It has magnified the friendships that are really one-sided acquaintances. It has destroyed any delusion of this being the life I dreamed to build. It has stripped the facade from so much. As I said, it has been excruciating.

But sometimes in the destruction of the illusion that reveals all the things that aren’t, God is working to show you who you are and who you need to quit being. That is what I am holding onto.

God.

Keep leaning hard. He is faithful.

Jerri